Occasional rantings about Dynamics CRM/365, Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure cloud. Intrigued about how people collaborate and data driven decision making. Taking the first small steps in machine learning. Putting all of the above in practical use to help companies "embrace" their customers

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Microsoft is offering a new First Release program. If you opt-in to join this new First Release program, you get to test the new features for Office 365, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online a couple weeks before they roll out to everyone else. To activate it go to Office 365 Admin Center > Service Settings > Updates. You will get a warning stating that activation of new features might take up to 24 hours to complete – so be patient.

The last couple of months a couple interesting new functional modules such as Delve, Yammer Groups and the new App launcher have been pre-released on Office 365 for which some might only become visible after you have activated first release. Remember that there also is an Office 365 for business public roadmap available (at office.com/roadmap) where you can see which functionality is being rolled out and which is under development. For more information check out the links below.

Also remember that you can always use the Office Developer Platform Uservoice (http://officespdev.uservoice.com/) to give feedback and request changes. You can submit your feedback for a specific change and encourage others who you know to support these changes by voting for them. If you want to give feedback with regards to InfoPath – there is a Microsoft Office Forms vNext User Voice (http://officeforms.uservoice.com/) as well. References

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Azure Event Hubs are an extension on the existing Azure Service Bus which provides hyper-scalable stream ingestion capabilities. It allows different producers (devices & sensors – possibly in the 10 thousands) to send continuous streams of data without interruption. There are a number of different scenario in which you typically see this kind of streaming data from different sensors such as future oriented scenarios such as connected cars, smart cities but also more common scenarios such as application telemetry or industrial automation.

Event hubs scaling is defined by Throughput Units (TUs) which is kind of like a pre-allocation of resources. A single TU is able to handle up to 2 MB/s for writes or 1000 events per second and 2MB/s for read operations. Load in the Event Hub is determined by creation of partitions, these partitions allow for parallel processing both from the consumer and producer side. Next to support for common messaging scenarios, competing consumers, it allows provide data retention policies up to 84 GB of event storage per day. The current release supports up to 32 partitions but you can log a call to increase this up to a 1000 partitions. Since a partition is allocated at most 1 TU, this would allow for 1GB/s data ingest per Event Hub. Messages can be send to an Event Hub publisher endpoint via HTTPS or AMQP 1.0, consumers can retrieve messages using AMQP 1.0

Monday, November 17, 2014

On Thursday 20th of November I will be delivering a webinar on the new capabilities in the Microsoft Azure Data Platform. With the recent addition of three new services - Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Factory and Azure Event Hubs - Microsoft is making progress in building the best cloud platform for both big data solutions as well as enabling the Internet of Things (IoT). These additions will allow you to process, manage and orchestrate data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors and turn this data into valuable insights for your business.

The above mentioned new services extend Microsoft's existing big data offering based on HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning. HDInsight is Microsoft's offering of Hadoop functionality on Microsoft Azure. It simplifies the setup and configuration of Hadoop cluster by offering it as an elastic service. Azure Machine Learning is a new Microsoft Azure-based tool that helps organization build predictive models using built in machine learning algorithms all from a web console.

In this webinar I will show what are the key capabilities of these different components, how they fit together and how you can leverage them in your own solutions.

The session is geared towards developers/advanced users and explains how you can write enterprise level applications on SharePoint 2010 without any server side code. We will go through real life applications and discuss the mechanisms used, the provisioning process, debugging techniques as well as best practices. The application written are fully compatible with Office 365/SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2013.

As Consultants we (try to) listen to our customer, (try to) address the requirements ... and finally (try to) deploy the solution. This seems like an easy job, but in reality Collaboration projects - and especially SharePoint or Yammer implementations - are a little more challenging. The fast adoption of cloud computing has introduced a new currency for license-based software: User Engagement. If you can’t engage your users, your revenue stream will start to spiral downwards. It should be obvious that Office 365 (and all of its individual components) are not exempt. We all need to focus on the post deployment!

This story bears its roots in my hands-on experience while trying to launch Yammer initiatives. It seems that everyone agrees that Yammer is a wonderful and viral service ... yet, the conversations seems to flat line in most organizations. We will review how you should (already) be addressing User Adoption now; but, more importantly, we will spend more time to look into the stars … a future where Data-Driven Collaboration will take User Engagement to the next level. This isn't a story about Delve. It's about ensuring you integrate data in all your projects to prepare for the future. The age of smart software …